Turning Point
by Leraiv Snape
Summary: Kylo Ren is learning to let the past die. Rey takes a gamble on changing him. A one-shot alternate take on the events in Snoke's throne room and the decisions made there. The seeds of an alliance - or a romance - are planted.


Disclaimer: The characters and situations in this piece are not mine. All rights and respects paid to George Lucas, Lucasfilm and Disney.

A/N: The idea for this fic has been floating around in my mind since I walked of "The Last Jedi" on opening night. Please enjoy a variation on the events leading to the scene in Snoke's throne room, a thought that I would have liked to see in the film.

Turning Point

The Force ripples. Softly at first, no more pressure than the annoyance of the medi-droid's attentions to his face as it stitches up his scar. It ripples again, stronger. The third time, he bats the droid away. _She_ is here. He's felt that unique presence before, a mixture of painful naivete and prickly defensiveness lacing the Force, a marriage of Light and fear, joy and suspicion underlying a relentless drive, a _need _to succeed, to understand. She is ripe for the Dark, ready to fall as soon as she abandons her foolish attachment to believing in the goodness of others and his own darkness stretches out, seeking her—

—she is there. Her appearance is as abrupt as falling. She is sitting in front of him, shock, disgust and fear written in the Force around her, not to mention on her face. Her blaster flashes in her hand and he feels its pulse shatter against his spine as he curls instinctively—

—but he is not injured. It was the echo of a kill shot, not the bolt itself. And she is gone, vanished as noiselessly as she came. He bolts from his chair, boots sliding as he dashes into the hallway, frantically searching. If _she _is here…

He frowns as he slows, turns in a circle to see nothing but empty corridor. She is-and-is-not here. Her power grazes his, sending the Force singing in his blood, like calling to like. But it is not strong enough. She is not actually on his ship. But if not, then how—?

She is in front of him again, clearly visible as if the corridor has breathed her into existence. "You will bring me Luke Skywalker," he commands her, thrusting his will at her. But instead of impacting the solid world of her mind, his effort goes though, around, his mind skitters sideways, desperately seeking purchase on that which is not there. This Rey is an apparition, not a vision, but a direct link between them. It should be possible only to those with enormous power and training.

"You're not doing this," he says thoughtfully, studying her features still locked in fury and pain. "The effort would kill you." He glances around them, seeking a conductor, the architect of this unasked-for bridge between them.

"Can you see my surroundings?"

"You're going to pay for what you did," she finally spits out a coherent threat, but Kylo Ren is far too intrigued by their connection to acknowledge her still-fresh grief over his father.

"I can't see yours. Just you. Somehow...this is something else." A sound from her side echoes faintly through the unorthodox link, and her head turns swiftly, glancing behind her. Another presence touches the edge of hers, its matured power lining her untamed potential. A Force signature he knows all too well. Ren's lip curls.

"Luke."

And she is gone, leaving him to stare at the sterile walls of Snoke's vessel and wonder what new trick of the Force this is.

He grits his teeth against the other knowledge: Rey has found his old master. And Luke is sure to fill her head with lies.

888

"You _are_ a monster."

Why deny it, if it pleases her to think so? His uncle is obviously not sparing her his side of their savage history. "Yes I am."

This time, he hears the surge of water and spray kicks up from whatever she was near, and even as she vanishes from his sight, water coats his face.

Is this, too, a legacy of the Skywalker blood? Had his grandfather been able to speak to others across vast distances?

A deliberately forgotten story of his uncle's shoves into his thoughts.

"_The Force surrounds us. Binds us. The air you breathe. The ground you walk on. The water you swim in. But it joins those who are sensitive to its pull even more thoroughly, Ben. To those we love most of all. I found that out with your mother." The young apprentice turned to his uncle, curious, and — he could not deny — a bit excited. While family stories were usually rather boring, every so often his uncle would talk about the Imperial War that had raged for nearly twenty-five years. It was a subject neither of his parents had ever been comfortable with discussing _— _even though they'd met in the Rebel Alliance. _

"_I was weak, failing. Between the pain of losing my hand and the shock of Vader's revelation, I was nearly out of my mind. When I dropped from the tower, I fully expected to fall into Bespin's poisonous atmosphere. I may have even wanted to. The idea that Vader was the father I had been seeking all my life...the fact that Obi-Wan had lied to me...oblivion was a welcome alternative to the impossible task of continuing, of processing all I had learned and lost."_

"_As I readied myself to drop from the spindly weather reader I had seized as my last stop between Cloud City and the gas giant, I felt her. My sister —_ _though I did not know it at the time — shining in the Force. In pain, as I had seen in my vision, and afraid. And so desperately alone. Even from a distance I knew through her that something dreadful had happened to Han."_

"_And I knew I could not abandon her to that loneliness, could not compound her pain with two losses. So I called to her instead. And untrained, uninitiated, your mother heard my call."_

The Sith trainee plunges past the automatic hatred thoughts of his uncle summons, his disgust at the credible child he had been, hanging on Luke Skywalker's every word — analysing the story now from the perspective of a master. Rey is training with Skywalker even now. The heir to Vader's bloodline knows he has a commanding head start, but Rey's power already calls in the Force as either warning or enticement — he is not yet sure which.

Why would the Force connect them? What piece of his destiny is it trying to show him? _Grandfather?_ Ren calls tentatively into the silence echoing around him in Rey's absence. _Is this you? Are you bridging the gap between us? _Is Vader trying to show him something, a path to successful domination where the Dark Lord had ultimately failed at the hands of his own son?

Sorrow swamps him, a sorrow keen and deep and cutting and both his-and-not-his. Kylo Ren struggles to breathe as the anguish fills his lungs and reaches for that deadliest enemy of any Sith: his own compassion.

_Beware_, the Force seems to urge as it threatens to drown him. It speaks with one voice and a thousand voices and try as he might, the apprentice cannot separate the one from the many.

888

The most frustrating part is that whatever binds them, he has no control over it. It is small comfort that she has none either. As he finishes a training routine and reaches for a towel, he feels her presence.

"I'd rather not do this right now." She is turned away from him.

"Yeah? Me too," he admits. But he cannot withdraw him her, and she seems equally unable to break their connection. She also appears to be struggling with some question, some statement other than her accusations the first two times she had unexpectedly appeared before his eyes.

"Why did you hate your fa—" as she turns, she catches sight of him, stripped to the waist, and quickly averts her eyes, the question dying in her throat. "Do you have something, a cowl or something you could put on?"

He does not smile, but he also makes no further move for his towel. The Dark feeds on discomfort, as it does on pain. He will spare her neither. When it is clear that he will not acquiesce to her request, she takes a breath, squares her shoulders and lifts her eyes to meet his anyway, her lingering disquiet dissipating into the Force.

It takes all he is not to smile. Courage. A necessary trait for any Jedi — or Sith. She is a worthy adversary. But the thought is growing that she can make an even better ally.

"Why did you hate your father?" Her grief paints the link between them in deep, red-tinted blues, striving to touch him, for him to share in her pain. "Give me an honest answer! You had a father who loved you! Who gave a damn about you!"

"I didn't hate him," Kylo Ren says quietly.

"Then WHY?" she cries in frustration, her voice raw to match the tears tracking down her face, the Force strobing redder around her with the strength of desperation.

"Why what?" he presses her gently, seeking the key to that power. She looks away and he leans on her again. "Why what? Say it."

"Why did you—" she can't finish at first, takes a breath and starts over. "Why did you kill him? I don't understand."

"No." She is so close. She seeks understanding, but it is her anger he needs to ignite, the fury of being one of the overlooked and the forgotten. "Your parents threw you away like garbage."

The Force around her surges to blood red. "They didn't!"

"They did. You can't stop needing them. It's your greatest weakness, looking for them everywhere. In Han Solo...now in Skywalker." But they were both failures, both incapable of becoming what Kylo Ren and Rey might become together. He studies her miserable face, an understanding of his own beginning to form.

The Force is connecting them because they are _not _enemies. Because it is with her at his side that he can overthrow Snoke and take command of the First Order. The combination of their power will make them invincible, immune to whatever puny threat his uncle might pose. She would come to understand: it wasn't about hatred or even about anger. It was about power. His uncle knows that better than anyone, had striven to hide that fact from Ren and is surely hiding it now from Rey. "Did he tell you what happened that night?" he asks her.

"Yes," she replies coldly, her jaw set.

He smiles. "No. He had sensed my power. As he senses yours. And he feared it." _I woke to find him standing over me, his lightsaber already drawn, ready to slay me in my sleep. My uncle. The last of the Jedi. The legend. _

"Liar," she musters, but he can see the doubt in her eyes, can feel the worm of it turning in her soul. Their bond is deepening, growing, and he can sense her confusion…

...as it backwashes into him, her struggle to reconcile the master she is coming to know with the one Kylo Ren remembers.

He ignores it, steps closer to where she is projected in his chambers. "Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. It is the only way to become what you were meant to be." He can _feel _her thinking, considering—

She is gone.

888

She is soaking wet and shivering faintly under the cloak she's using as a towel. His first instinct overrides his Sith training without warning. He wants to reach to her, to warm the skin on her cheeks and restore color to her pallid complexion.

Compassion. He smothers it. She is not even aware he is there.

"I thought I would find answers here. I was wrong. I'd never felt so alone."

"You're not alone," he announces himself quietly, not quite sure where the words stem from, knowing at the same time that they are true. Her head comes up, and gone are the hatred and fear from the first time she saw him. Gone, too, is the wariness from the second and third times.

Now the Force conveys strength through their connection. Not the spiky strength of the warrior in battle, but the bedrock strength upon which civilizations are made. Strength — and a strange, growing form of trust.

"Neither are you," she tells him. "It isn't too late." He stares at her, derailed from his thoughts of turning her, captured by the intensity of her regard, of the surety he feels radiating from her in waves in inundating waves of undiluted Light. She is extending her hand, as if to touch him, the first time she has ever moved towards instead of away from him. He pulls off his own glove as if bidden, curious to see how far this can go, to know if he will be able to actually feel the fingers she is gingerly moving to bridge the galaxy between them.

They close the gap, and it is he who takes the final step to close the millimeters between their fingers and press his to hers. The warmth of her flesh nearly takes his breath away. The visions that flash through his mind at their connection succeed.

—_Snoke in pieces, the throne room on fire_—

—_Rey's magnificence in battle as she spins, twirling a red lightsaber that slashes through their shadowy enemies_—

—"_I will always stand with you"_—

—_overlooking the long-defunct Senate chamber, he is gasping with the triumph of a battle newly-won as he turns to watch her ascend to the Chancellor's seat, claiming the galaxy as their own_—

"STOP!" Skywalker's presence floods him, shattering the vision and shutting out Rey, slamming Kylo Ren back into his seat on Snoke's vessel with a violence that shatters the Force around him. For the first time, he actively reaches for her, seeking what his uncle has so furiously interrupted—

—but all he can feel in the Force is the strobing anger of his uncle, throbbing like an open wound, powerful enough to eclipse even Rey's brilliance.

Once, Ren would have felt triumph in knowing he's so enraged the older Jedi. But now it is immaterial. Rey has to come to him. Or he to her. Their destinies lie with one another — that much his vision made very clear.

888

She is here. And this is no semi-fluid sense of her presence, to be cut off at the whim of that which has been binding them. She is _here_. On the ship. Triumph does surge now, knowing that she left Skywalker for him. Had she seen her destiny with the clarity he had? Has she come to claim it?

Whatever Snoke's plans for her, Kylo Ren knows he will not let his master truly bring harm to Rey. Rey is the future. Snoke, and all that he represents, is the past. Fleetingly, the apprentice wonders what his grandfather would think, whether Vader would encourage the boldness of his thoughts, but even that question mark swiftly dwindles. Vader, too, is part of a galaxy long gone. Just as Rey is freeing herself from Skywalker, he must let go of Vader to become what his potential has always promised he could be.

He strides to the pod that has just been permitted to dock, a legion of stormtroopers falling in behind him. He gazes down at her face, nervous, but determined, and there is a touch of firm recognition in the Force around her, a contented blue. She believes in him. Believes he will not harm her, believes he will come with her.

No one has believed in him in this way since he awoke to see his uncle standing over him with a green blade.

But despite her call in the Force, he has his part to play, and joining hands with her now on this glaringly public platform will not help them. He moves on, out of her line of sight, and the troopers step up behind him, cuffs in hand.

888

"You don't have to do this," she is saying urgently as the lift moves ever-closer to Snoke. Her touch in the Force is now woven with uncertainty, washing over him with her proximity, even as Snoke's ever-present chill grows stronger, crawling down Ren's spine.

"I feel the conflict in you. It's tearing you apart. Ben…" unguarded, he looks at her. The way she says his given name makes it feel not like the insult Snoke insists it is, but just...his.

"I saw your future." She's looking at him now with that earnest expression of certitude, masking the misgivings the Force betrayed. "Just the shape of it, but solid and clear." She crosses the lift in two steps, standing close enough that he has to look down at her, can feel the heat from her body on his uniform. No one has stood this close to him since his father fell from the bridge on the Starkiller. And before that, he can not recall. He fights two instincts: to step back, and to close the gap. "You will not bow before Snoke. You'll turn. I'll help you. I saw it."

"I saw something too," he responds. He hasn't been sure he was going to tell her, but she needs to know —- has a right to the glory he's seen for them both. "Because of what I saw, I know when the moment comes, you'll be the one to turn. You'll stand with me." He can sense her revulsion at this idea, her confusion rising. Both visions cannot be true. But there is one thing she cannot resist. "Rey. I saw who your parents are."

She is looking up at him in fear and trepidation and hope...and then she steps away, taking her heat and possibly her whispered offer "_I'll help you"_ with her. She does not ask.

He is grateful for the return of distance between them. The lift opens not five seconds later, and he has no wish to explain to his master why Rey might be standing within the reach of her captor's embrace.

She turns to face Snoke, and freezes. Despite her prodigious abilities and the undimmed faith he senses, the Supreme Leader fairly crackles with malevolent power, his freezing presence crashing over them. She balks...as any creature of the Light would when confronted with such solid darkness. Kylo Ren takes her by the elbow, and marches her into the throne room to Snoke's crowing praise.

He kneels, and largely ignores his master's delight at having Rey in his grasp until:

"It was I who bridged your minds."

_Snoke_. Not Vader. Not the Force. Not the balance of power. His master. All to further his own ends. "I stoked Ren's conflicted soul. I knew he was not strong enough to hide it from you - and _you _were not wise enough to resist the bait."

"I stoked Ren's conflicted soul."

Stoked? Created. He had delivered his master his greatest achievement: "_I killed Han Solo!"_

"_And look at you...the deed split your spirit to the bone..."_

It has. Kneeling in his master's chamber, Rey held fast by Snoke's mastery, Kylo Ren knows he cannot deny it. If it had not, he would not have hesitated in battle against the Resistance.

_The fighter bay erupted in fire and blood. He felt their deaths reverberate, the Dark rejoicing at the loss of life. He seizes on its victorious surge, wrapping it around himself before thrusting it outward, using the Force to read the battle around him, to find and eliminate his targets._

_Now the command centre. One more shot and it will be over. One more…_

_Anguish rips through him, so consuming it blinds him for a moment to the ship in front of his, to the instruments under his hands, to the Force guiding him. Anguish...and the resonance of forgiveness. _

Mother, _he acknowledges bleakly, his thumb hovering over the discharge on his weapons array. A few more millimetres and he would prove to Snoke that it meant nothing, that _she _meant nothing, that he is fully apprenticed to the Dark…_

_His father's hand on his face. The absolution in Han's eyes even as pain robbed him of speech. _"I killed Han Solo!" _At what cost? Could he send his mother, his mother who he sensed even now, who shone in the Force as his uncle did, into the dark? Consign her to death?_

"What price will you pay, Ben? How much for your soul?" _Kylo Ren shakes his head even as he lifts his thumb from the trigger. That voice...it had tried to speak to him before. He had always turned it away, frightened to the core of himself what it meant, who it was._

Not that, _he admits to the voice. He had thrust his lightsaber through his father. But this...this is a price he will not pay._

_His two wingmen tear past him as he hesitates, torpedoes blazing. Making the shot he has not made. _

_Kylo Ren watches his mother's haven evaporate in flame and vacuum._

Now he bends the knee to the creature before him, the creature that had deliberately torn him in half to hold the girl now trembling with the effort of resisting him in his grasp.

"_The potential of your bloodline...a new Vader. Alas, you're no Vader. You're just a child in a mask."_

_I am not Vader,_ Ren promises silently, shielding his thoughts from his master not twenty meters away. _But neither am I child. The mask is gone. And you have assumed too much...for the last time._

"I knew he could not keep it from you...and you were not wise enough to resist the bait."

Snoke thrusts Rey from him, hovering her in the middle of the chamber. Ren can feel her fighting him, struggling against the Sith's iron grip, the effort flaying her nerves. He watches, drops his eyes, struggling to keep his emotions from overriding his control. Fury, hatred...these things Snoke approves of. He takes his growing anger at his master and fans it, encouraging the rage to shield the conflict and confusion battling in his soul that Snoke and Rey have created between them.

"Give. Me. Everything."

Her back arches and she screams.

_If you do nothing, you will regret it for the rest of your life_. _The conflict can guide you._ That voice. The one he knows, dimly, belongs not to Vader, but to Anakin Skywalker...the grandfather he has not wanted to allow in, not wished to acknowledge. _The choice is before you now, Ben. The galaxy hinges on your decision. If power is all you lust for, you have achieved your end. The fate of billions has settled on your shoulders. _

Ren cannot see his grandfather — the Force ghost would not manifest here — but Anakin's statement resonates in his bones, prickles in his blood. Even dead, the former Sith Lord and Jedi has enough power to set the Force singing.

His master is laughing as he releases Rey and she crumples unceremoniously to the deck. Ren's eyes dart to her, but her focus is entirely on Snoke. "I did not expect Skywalker to be so wise. We shall give him and the Jedi Order the death he desires. After the rebels are gone, we will go to his planet and obliterate the entire island."

Rage surges in Rey, dispelling the momentary helplessness Ren had felt. She throws her hand out, calling her lightsaber. It soars to her — only to whip around, bypass her hand and sweep in from the opposite side to knock her in the head. She drops, Ren clenches his fist to keep himself from extending his hand, and she rises again without a glance back at him.

"Look here, now." Rey is dragged forward at Snoke's command, shoved in front of the viewing screen, and Ren can feel what she's looking at without needing the visual. The Resistance has launched transports under cloak. But the cloak has been cracked, and the undefended ships are plainly visible to the First Order scopes. "The entire Resistance on those transports," Snoke's voice is almost a caress as Ren feels two of them disintegrate, the life within them extinguished.

"Soon, they will all be gone. For you, all is lost."

Vision explodes in Ren's mind, forceful enough to be painful, clear enough to eclipse his present view of Snoke and his surroundings.

_He's in a different throne room, grander, darker, and the huge viewport is looking over a lushly forested moon orbiting a dead planet. The wizened figure in the chair next to him reeks of Darkness and power and arrogance. Next to this all-encompassing blackness, Snoke is but the fall of night compared to a black hole. _

_The young man standing at the window, staring in horror at the space battle just beyond his reach, rage and sorrow rising in him, is someone Ren recognizes. _Skywalker_. The master who betrayed him. But in addition to his own raw, furious feelings , there is pride, and a messy tangle of emotions he might also call love. _

_And fear. Fear that this Luke Skywalker would not leave this throne room alive. Fear that he/ Vader had failed his son..._

"_Your fleet is lost. And your friends on the Endor moon will not survive. There is no escape, my young apprentice. The Alliance will die. As will your friends."_

The window into the past clears as abruptly as it materialized, and Ren is shocked to find himself still kneeling. _The fate of billions…_

Vader had not been a faithful servant of the Emperor. He had, even then, been plotting to overthrow his master and take command of the Empire himself, restore order, strike a balance — with Skywalker at his side.

"You have the spirit of a true Jedi." Snoke's gentle comment is almost a compliment. Ren's lightsaber is revolving to a stop in front of him, Rey shoved to the deck once more after another futile charge. "And because of that, you must die."

Snoke brings her to her knees with a gesture, her rigid spine betraying her attempt to break from his power as he forcefully turns her around to look directly at Ren.

"My worthy apprentice. Son of Darkness. Heir apparent to Lord Vader. Where there was conflict I now sense resolve. Where there was weakness: strength. Complete your training and fulfill your destiny!"

Ren rises slowly, lightsaber in hand. His gaze never wavers from the woman on her knees before him. "I know what I have to do."

But she doesn't. He can see, for the first time since their minds connected, genuine fear in her eyes as she looks up at him. Her fear closes around her, the Force shutting her off. She is afraid of him. Afraid he's going to be the obedient lap-dog his master has mistaken him for.

"Ben…" she whispers, and he recalls the death pallor of her cold face after her experience in cave, the warmth of her body in the lift as she stood with him, her Light dispelling the Dark, his own desire to reach out to her.

"You think you can turn him? Pathetic child," Snoke is sneering in the background, but Ren's eyes never leave Rey's, his master's words fading into background noise as he gathers the Force around him. He has time to notice that the shape and texture of his touch in the Force is changing — grey instead of black — but he brushes that aside for the moment. There will be time, after, to analyze, to understand. Now, he turns the saber on Snoke's throne with a twist of his hand, even as his own saber rises to ready position for the woman in front of him—

"He ignites it...and kills his true enemy!"

—the sound of ignition echoes in the chamber, and Rey flinches in readiness for the blade through her own neck—

But it is not the livid spear of red blinding her. The swamping darkness of Snoke's hold on the Force, his binding command of her body, vanishes. She twists as she collapses to the deck, Ren can feel hope blossoming in her as she arches to see her own lightsaber — Anakin Skywalker's saber — rip through the Supreme Leader at his apprentice's command.

Her own hand shoots up to capture the weapon almost as an afterthought as it soars back toward them and she rolls to her feet, heedless of the guards already starting to move around them, her eyes locking unerringly on his face, the question and hope pulsing in the Force around them devastatingly obvious:

_Did that really just happen? Did you make the choice? Are we in this together?_

Ren jerks his head at the onrushing guards — _Yes_, he answers her silently, hoping she can hear him as his lightsaber flares to life — and whirls so his back is against hers as the Praetorian Guard rushes them. Red and blue flash against the guards' sweeping double-bladed swords and whirling nunchucks. Rey whirls and stabs one coming up on Ren's right, and he feels her back against his as she uses him to kick a foe back.

They separate to take on three each at once, and he admires her raw strength as he duels with Snoke's men. She still has little skill with the laser sword (how _did _she manage to escape him on the Starkiller?), but she strives to make up for it with punishing blows on her enemies. So far it's working against those uninitiated in the Force.

Mostly. Now that they have halved the number of guards, those remaining are honing in on him. Only one is still battling Rey — and he can easily see that she is tiring. She doesn't yet know how to draw strength directly through the Force, and it is her own depleted stamina and desperation that drives her now.

He winces as she takes a slice across the arm, hears her cry of pain.

They have to end this. She did not come here to die.

He is still facing three to her one, and he needs to dispose of them quickly. Sweeping in a slow circle, he backs towards two of them, his blade flashing up to take off one head.

Two left. Her swings are getting wilder, her opponent bearing down on her intently.

One charges him, and catches his lightsaber in the throat. The dying man brings up his arms, and, too late, Ren realizes that his adversary has trapped the lightsaber against him, allowing his cohort to charge in swinging to take the Sith's head. Ren jumps back, leaving his weapon behind. The guard slashes at him, ducks behind him, and Ren feels the hilt of the double-bladed stick against his throat.

Across the room, Rey is trapped in a hold that will break her arm before the electric beam severs her head. The Force surges, power gathering around the girl from Jakku. She glances at the guard, drops her saber, catches it in her weak hand and slashes the guard at the knees. It's over from there. His head goes next and she whirls.

She sees him, and he is gratified by the fear he sees in her eyes, by knowing that she sees him as more than Han Solo's killer, that she no longer wants him to die.

"Ben!" she cries, and throws her own lightsaber to him. He catches it with ease, activates it — and the pressure on his windpipe relaxes as the guard strangling him drops to the chamber floor.

It has been no more than a matter of minutes and it is over, the acrid smell of lightsaber burns filling the chamber along with electric smoke and fire. He looks to Rey through the wavering smoke and stares, transfixed for a moment.

In the sudden silence, her aura blazes, a tapestry of color he has not seen before, the blinding blues and whites of the Light merging with the sickly yellow and borderline-black reds that are the hallmark of the Dark Side. But neither seem to have a grip on her. As she gulps in air, her life force returns to a neutral pale green, patterns of Light and Dark sloughing away now that she is done using them, leaving her almost innocently untouched.

In himself, he can feel the fury, the raw power of the rage that fueled him through the battle, the Dark swamping him, singing in his blood, freeing him from pain, from fear. He wonders if she could see it, if she is developed enough to see the energy outside as well as inside the body.

"_I saw your future." _She's come for that future, to turn him as his uncle had once sought the redemption of his grandfather.

The thought of Skywalker dims the curiosity that flames in his chest, and he draws his own deep breath, straightening himself and wrapping the Dark around him like a cloak. Snoke made it abundantly clear that he'd been playing with both of them. There is no guaranteed, Force-approved destiny here. Their fate is what they will make of it, and Rey's might yet flow on either path.

"The fleet," she says, and she's running to where the viewscreen shows the rebel fleet shrinking under the First Order's punishing blows. "Order them to stop firing! There's still time to save the fleet!"

She turns to him, and everything she wants is written in those dark, expressive eyes.

He can feel the hope emanating from her, the stamp of his uncle's teachings in the way she says his given name. And he can hear the offer she is going to make him, almost before it leaves her mouth. As in his interrogation room a bare handful of weeks ago, the sheer strength of her innate power shines brilliantly, telegraphing thought and movement, but it does not do so at her bidding or for any set purpose. Her talents are still wild, for all that she has spent time with Skywalker, a mixture of Dark and Light he's neither seen before nor read about.

_The Force will set you free_. The most ancient of the Sith precepts. Rey was free of the influence of both sides. She served no master and obeyed no order.

She was unique, and she would teach him how she walked through the Force without having to swear allegiance to the corrupted Sith or Jedi.

But not today.

_The fate of billions._

He shakes his head. "You go. Save who you can."

Shock ripples between them in the Force. "What? No! You have to come with me...you just killed Snoke! You can't stay here!" She is standing in front of him again, this time without the cuffs, and he can feel her need to reach him, to make the connection Snoke bred between them a real one of their own choosing.

"Someone has to command the First Order, Rey. Hux will not end this. It falls to me. And you. But you have to return to the Resistance. There is no one else there who would heed me if I called for a cease fire."

"Leia—"

He winces at his mother's name, pushes away the complex emotional tangle that obscures the clarity of his ambition. Leia is part of his past, as surely as his father and grandfather. She, too, must fall aside if he and Rey are to reach their full potential. But this is a truth that the concerned young woman in front of him cannot hear. Not yet. So he feeds her another, irrelevant truth that he knows will be more palatable.

"Leia is my mother. She is loved and respected by the Resistance — but her feelings about me are too complex to allow her to make the decision. Others will dismiss her, assuming that she is simply desperate to have her son back. But the Resistance doesn't know about this," his hand rises between them, a tacit acknowledgement of all they have shared, of all they might yet do, before he clasps his hands behind his back in parade rest. "They will listen to you. You have trained with Luke Skywalker," he does not disguise his bitterness at his old master, "They will believe anything you tell them."

"And you? Will you be safe here?"

He keeps himself from smiling at the sincerity of her question, at the pale green tendrils he feels prodding gently against his awareness, questing for his feelings. He has forgotten what it is like to be cared about for himself, instead of for his power, his potential.

"I will. I have a plan." He jerks his head at the doors. "Now go. We've made…" he glances around at the bodies liberally scattered on the platform, his gaze settling on Snoke last and longest, "quite a mess. Someone will be here soon. If they find you…"

Her life is forfeit.

He feels her hesitation as she gives him a final, searching look, in question —- _is this all there is? _— and in plea — _are you sure you won't come? _ He returns it impassively. Their future is unwritten, it will be what they make of it.

When he does not reply, she tilts her head in a nod and starts for the doors to the lift. As she steps inside, she lifts her hand, and Ren feels his grandfather's lightsaber fly from his side, hears it connect with her palm. She smiles in subdued recognition and ducks through the door.

888

From his place carefully arranged in a sprawl on the floor, he senses Hux's approach. He can feel the man's fury, his disbelief. Ren knows when the general catches sight of him, feels his hatred spike, can see his intention clearly etched in the man's too-open mind as Hux reaches for his weapon.

Ren lets out a theatrical gasp, shoving himself heavily off the floor. Hux quickly takes his hand from his blaster.

"What happened?" Hux snaps tersely as Ren gains his feet.

Ren blinks as if clearing his vision, taking in the tumbled halves of Snoke's ruined body. "The girl murdered Snoke. What happened?"

"She took Snoke's escape craft."

Of course she had. Insult to injury. He carefully does not smile. The face he presents to Hux is all righteous fury and indignation.

"We know where she's going. Get all our forces down to that Resistance base. Let's finish this."

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A/N: Thank you for reading. Let me know what you think. Kylo Ren's continued immaturity throughout the film bothers me – I didn't like it in Anakin, and I'm not loving it in him. A little cunning would be nice. In addition to that fact, I personally would have liked to have finished that sequence with a question as to which side he is really on and set him up a bit better to either fulfill or disappoint us on a redemption arc. That being said: love it? Hate it? Review it! Thank you!


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